How to land the jumbo benefits of the Asian century

Date: November 17 2012

Jacob Saulwick

IF THE coming century is to be the Asian one, and Australia wants to be part of that, it may make sense to allow people from Asia to get here. But as almost everyone now recognises, the only airport in the country's biggest city - the city with a harbour that people want to buy postcards of - is filling up.

In a decade or so, give or take, there'll be scant room to land more planes in Sydney, unless you want jumbos to fly all night over the densest part of town. And as anyone who has been stuck in a holding pattern over the city on an international flight knows, this is a problem for the whole country.

Not that the state's Premier minds.

Barry O'Farrell, with that weary caution that may well define his place in history, offers the absurd sop that somehow the nation will get its act together to build fast trains before it lays another strip of tarmac east of Broken Hill and north of Bega.

But it is too easy and it is wrong to level all blame on O'Farrell for Sydney's second airport impasse, which may actually end up meaning something for the national economy.

O'Farrell may be recalcitrant.

But airports are ultimately a matter for federal governments, in this case the federal Labor government.

And Sydney tends to be a Labor city. By and large, Sydney residents tend to elect Labor MPs who tend to nominate Labor premiers and on occasion Labor prime ministers and they need to bear some responsibility for what's happening here.

And there's hardly an issue that better reveals the angst, the awkwardness, the unruliness, the sheer messiness and difficulty of getting what needs to be done done amid the self-interested strands that make up the Labor Party than Sydney's airport dilemma.

Take Anthony Albanese.

After an exemplary apparatchik apprenticeship, the minister with responsibility for aviation landed in Parliament in 1996.

His maiden speech ran to 3094 words, and he used about a third of them to give his views on aviation infrastructure in Sydney.

Albanese criticised his federal Labor forebears for opening a third runway at the Mascot airport in 1994 and delaying the construction of a second airport in Sydney's west.

''The reversal of Labor's commitment to the third runway and the prevarication on Sydney West Airport was about economics, not aviation or even politics as some have suggested,'' Albanese said.

''The only real solution is to provide the public infrastructure for Sydney West Airport,'' he went on.

You might imagine, then, that on becoming the federal Transport and Aviation Minister in 2007 almost five years ago to the day, Albanese would have cracked the whip on this one.

You might imagine - again, five years into the job and on an issue he declares as critical for the economic well-being of the entire country - he would at least be 100 per cent on a site for building that Sydney West Airport.

But he's done what governments tend to do when economics or politics get very hard: prevaricate, by way of interminable expert reports, prepared at chilling cost to the taxpayer.

Albanese commissioned the national aviation white paper of 2009, which was silent on a second airport for Sydney.

This year he released a vast study into Sydney's aviation capacity that said planning for an airport needed to start immediately, and that Badgerys Creek in the city's far west and Wilton, to the city's far, far south west, were the only two reasonable options.

The report said Badgerys, about 50 kilometres west of Sydney, was the much better option, but that has been ruled out by Labor since Simon Crean said it was in 2003.

So Wilton it is. Except maybe it is not.

Albanese has not committed to Wilton. He's commissioned another report, at a cost of $1.5 million, to see if it really makes sense.

There's a good chance that report will say the typography of Wilton won't work. Planes like to land on flat ground - Wilton is ridgy.

Which may leave us, early next year, with the federal government without a nominated site for a second airport in Sydney.

That is, unless it backtracks on Simon Crean's 2003 vow that Labor would not build an airport at Badgerys Creek.

You get the sense this is what Albanese wants to do. The government already owns 1700 hectares of land at Badgerys, and it would cost far less to build transport links to Badgerys than Wilton. (Although Wilton is a lot closer to Wollongong; in the same way that getting to Melbourne's second airport at Avalon is handy for people living in and around Geelong.)

According to some of those studies Albanese has commissioned, Badgerys remains a viable slab of space outside Sydney's development footprint.

To build a small, domestically oriented airport at Badgerys similar to Avalon would require retro-fitting about 800 houses with noise insulation. It would require the compulsory purchase of about 40 houses. This seems manageable.

This week the Sydney Business Chamber weighed in to say that, well, a Badgerys airport would be good business.

But it would be a kind of crazy-brave policy to suddenly announce, in an election year, an about-face and a commitment to Badgerys.

Labor's under-fire western Sydney MPs would not have a bar of it. And it would also expose Labor to the sort of eye-rolling ridicule it suffered in 2010 when it tried to sell an election-eve train line in the critical federal political battle of Sydney's west.

It is possible to have some sympathy for Albanese as he tries to find the right combination of politics and economics to resolve a 50-year stalemate and get another airport up.

But until he's won this battle - until he can actually nominate a physical site and argue and cajole for development on an actual plot of land - all his talk about the hypothetical need for another airport in Sydney and its implication for the national economy rings hollow.

Which is depressing, because if Albanese, the inner-western Sydney MP who has more incentive than anyone to sort out Sydney's airport mess, cannot do so, you wonder who can.

In the meantime, with Melbourne now considering a third airport, the Asian century may well be a golden age for Victoria.